Prescribed medications can, in certain situations, cause adverse drug reactions in patients. Less drastic adverse drug reactions, such as change in mood, loss of appetite, and nausea, may diminish the quality of life. But although some adverse drug reactions are not very serious, others cause death, hospitalization, or serious injury. In the United States, more than 2 million people each year are injured by adverse drug reactions, including more than 100,000 fatalities. When considered as a fraction of all mortalities, adverse drug reactions are one of the leading causes of death in the United States. In many cases, adverse drug events could and should have been avoided.
More adverse reactions occur in patients 60 or older. There are various reasons for the propensity of older patients to experience adverse drug reactions, including smaller bodies, different body composition, decreased ability of the liver and/or kidney to process drugs, increased drug sensitivity, decreased blood pressure maintaining ability, additional medications and inadequate testing of drugs on older adults. Consequently, older patients require more thorough medical care when exposed to a drug treatment.
Physicians and healthcare workers must evaluate whether a prescribed medication is causing an adverse reaction in the patient before the medication is deemed safe for the patient. One approach to this problem involves a distributed and network-accessible database that logs and disseminates information pertaining to adverse drug reactions (ADRs) among pharmaceutical providers, such as pharmacies. These Pharmacy Managed Systems (PMS) provide for the storage and distribution of data pertaining to treatment and monitoring of ADRs. This approach, however, leaves much to be desired. One problem with this approach is that no patient orientation is provided. Without appropriate interaction and information from the patient, the ability of a PMS to detect an ADR is decreased. Further, the current approach does not match an ADR with the observed changes in an older patient. A conventional PMS simply lists common ADRs for given medications, and the healthcare worker must match the listed information to the ADR being experienced by the patient. Additionally, the current approach does not identify multiple medications with similar ADRs that may be mimicking the observed changes in a patient. This identification process is left to the health care professional who must review all medications and their associated ADRs in order to determine which ADR may match the observed changes. This approach is time consuming, resulting in very few patient reviews being made, and is at a high risk for errors. Consequently, the current approach algorithm is only effective in residential care settings, rather than community settings.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above, and particularly for a more efficient way of detecting adverse reactions to medication.